


I Was A Teenage Robot

by Quilly



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, Robot AU, Sensory Deprivation, and jade is having too much fun to care about where she went wrong, and then sensory overload, in which karkat is a cantankerous robot with glitchy programming, was i ever dancing with an android named karkat?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-12
Updated: 2013-11-12
Packaged: 2018-01-01 08:15:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1042485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quilly/pseuds/Quilly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Your creator calls you Karkat and you hate her slippery biological guts. Especially when she smiles that adorable bucktoothed grin. It's not adorable. Stop it.</p><p>(Request for robo-Karkat that got entirely too out-of-hand.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Was A Teenage Robot

**Author's Note:**

> Just a request fill from my Tumblr that I'm moving over! Enjoy!

 

Your name? You don’t have one. You’re a robot, obviously. But your creator calls you “Karkat” so you suppose that’ll do.

You came online about a year ago and it’s been _great_ , just _peachy_ , living on this island with no one but a bucktoothed supergenius brat. Really. If you had a choice, you would’ve at least relocated to somewhere more modern than the middle of nowhere. Ugh.

Speaking of your most generous creator, she’s working on your joints right now. Stupid rain and humidity rusts you something crazy. You’re waiting, all impatient, for her to finish. _Impatience_ is a program you are familiar with, like most of your glitchy emotional programs. As you’ve been told frequently, you weren’t created to be like this. No, if she had _her_ way, you wouldn’t feel anything at all, a slave of metal and wiring.

Despite that, she insists on nattering to you about things you don’t even listen to and treating you like one of her fellow meatsacks. She just doesn’t get you, and to be honest, you are having trouble quantifying her, as well. You deliberately disobey her orders to show her she doesn’t own you, and she just smiles and does whatever she needed for herself. Oh, as if you’re just a lump of useless ore and sparks she can pass over! As if!

She causes contradictions in your logic faculties quite often, actually.

The maintenance appointments always make you nervous; they make you remember how she asked you to secure the tarps over her pumpkin patch a few days ago, and you didn’t do it, and half her crop was destroyed in a sudden hailstorm. They make you remember that her fingers are close to your heart, to your wires and mainframes, and you itch to run, to rust out somewhere where she can’t find you. But her hands are always gentle and careful with your innards. You don’t deserve that, and it makes you angrier, because _you are your own robot_ and she shouldn’t treat you so well.

She glances at you and grins. “Almost done, Karkat.”

You hmph. “Whatever.”

She takes her hands out of you and wipes them free of oil before screwing your chestplate back on. Then she wipes down your chassis and taps the few patches she’s had to weld on because you are not very smart, for a superior computer-brain.

"That should do it," she says. "You can go on your ornery way now."

She always says things like that, and she always sounds chipper. You hate that.

You are sulking on the rim of the volcano when she sends you a command request.

_can you bring an obsidian sample from the volcano?_

No. No you cannot. You sulk and grump and absently touch your patches. You can’t feel, of course, but the gesture means something to your mistake of a programming set.

You break off a chunk and fly it back to her, and don’t look at her when she smiles.

(You downloaded a very wide selection of pirated human films a few weeks after your initial creation and watch them frequently, for study. Human behavior is so strange, but something about the genre called “romantic comedy” speaks to you on an unknowable level. You go to them, when Jade does something particularly perplexing, as if by analyzing and re-analyzing they’ll reveal something about her.)

Time passes, and your aural receptors pick up a sharp scream from miles away. Your faulty programming has you up and blasting in its direction within seconds. You are just in time to plow into the rather large tusked animal currently attempting to mow down your mechanic—plow into, and _through_ , and you are feeling a new emotion when you blast through, covered in the animal’s viscera and running a search on its classification. _Boar_ , your brain tells you, as you step out of its carcass and towards Jade.

She is against the trunk of a tree, breathing slowly, and her leg held in both hands. You see she has sustained a serious injury, possibly from one of the tusks, and a fuse shorts out within you. You walk towards her, and she snaps.

“ _Stop_.”

You do, surprised more than anything.

"Clean yourself off before you come anywhere near me," she says, teeth clenched, and you look down and realize that her command is sound. You take a dip in the sea, shake yourself out, resign  yourself to another cleaning in the lab, and gently gather up your creator, flicking through your knowledgebase to see if you have any idea how to fix her leg. You do not.

So you go on a search as you fly back to her lab, and by the time you are sitting her on the table you frequent you know what to do. She is pale, indicating blood loss, and you work quickly as you dare. Her hardware is not as secure as your own. It makes very little sense to you, biological and wet and slippery where yours is mechanical and hard and precise. But you disinfect her, sew her up, bandage her tightly, and feed her to increase her blood production. Humans are so… _fragile_. You hadn’t realized it before, but she is.

"Thank you," she says, and you stare at her, mind racing through her expression and tone and the cultural connotations of the word combination and you do the only logical thing and fly away. You will have to be back before you rust out again. But.

The intimacy of what you have done hits you later, secluded in another knot of jungle too thick for mere mortals to pass through. Her hands have poked and prodded every inch of you, created and molded you, but never have your fingers returned the favor and—and _healed_ her.

You mash your metal fingers together and somehow feel…bereft.

You return to her with a grimy chassis and watch her carefully this time, watching her as she takes you apart, gently polishes and cleans, and puts you back together, watches as she strips off her gloves and runs the pads of her fingers over your weak points and your dents.

"I have a request," you blurt. She blinks at you.

"Oh?"

"Is it possible to create an artificial nervous system?" you ask, and she blinks again.

"What for? I was under the impression you believed that your inability to feel pain makes you superior," she says, and her tone is teasing, but eyes very serious. You perform the human gesture of sighing, for emphasis.

"It’s nothing. Forget it."

It is impossible for you to forget anything, but you do fail to remember that oftentimes it’s the same for Jade. She is…brilliant. Of course she is, she made _you_. But you spend another indeterminate amount of time (two months three weeks four days twelve hours thirty-six minutes eight seconds and counting) retracing the paths her hands have taken over you, registering the soft squeal of metal on metal but unable to feel it, getting more and more frustrated. More than once you consider breaking into your own database and erasing— _everything_. Her smile and her frown and her gentle touches and her smacks against your exterior and the day you closed her wound, especially that day.

Your extensive research into the psychology of the human culture has taught you that you are portraying symptoms of an undefinable human emotion you are afraid to name. Humans throw it around like it means nothing, though you know it means everything, and you are just so _conflicted_ —

_hey karkat! come to the lab! i have a surprise for you!_

What shred of dignity you possess is insulted by how fast you return to her.

You skid to a stop in the lab, looking straight at her, and she is perched in front of— _oh_.

It’s a delicate network with hundreds of tiny wires, and you can map out everywhere it’s supposed to go, and you look mutely at her. She smiles.

"It’ll require a lot of strenuous work to get it all installed," Jade says. "And you’ll have to be off for most of it, just so you don’t accidentally feel something and wreck anything. But…if you want it…I finished it."

You are…what is this one…overwhelmed? Grateful? Frightened?

All of the above, apparently. You are surprised you aren’t blowing fuses.

You swallow hard.

And nod.

She lays you down as gently as she always has, and as her hand inches towards your Off button she pauses.

"And I can make some changes to your chassis, if you want. It’ll be a little more…biological, but should still be just as durable, if you want it."

You study her and do some number-crunching and fretting. You hesitantly nod.

She smacks a kiss against your forehead and you find yourself wondering if you’ll be able to feel it when you wake up.

You are off, but your consciousness is awake, looping through half-remembered bits of coding and snatches of old conversations, and you mentally deconstruct yourself, deconstruct Jade, deconstruct your life together and what she is and what she means and you have never— _wanted_ —so much.

If she asks you will not admit it. Ever.

But you want her. You want her around.

You drift away.

Someone is stroking your face.

Your eyes snap open—or are you just switched on? No, you can blink, this is a thing you can do, you have—you have _eyelids_.

What did she do to you?

You sit up, feel a jolt all the way through you, and lay back down hard, breathless when you cannot breathe, your circuitry thrumming, and Jade hovers over you, laughing.

"Take it easy, dummy," she says, all affection, and slowly you sit up again. You look down.

Your chassis has been covered in something much resembling skin, but grey, and a quick analysis tells you it’s a synthetic compound Jade created to mimic skin’s texture. It rests over a more malleable shell closer to your circuits, and can probably be taken apart with as much ease as your pure-metal shell.

 _I’m a real boy now_ , a quote from some movie echoes around your head, and you feel the urge to laugh.

"Take it easy," Jade smiles, and you look at her and it’s like you’ve never seen her before, though you remember every centimeter of her face. "Try moving your fingers and toes."

You wiggle said appendages. Then stretch your arms, then your legs, and you twist around and put your feet flat against the floor.

It’s cold.

It’s _cold._

You do laugh, wiggling your toes against the tile. You can—everything just—it all _feels_ so much. You make no sense. But you can _feel_. You can FEEL!

You look at Jade, who is grinning, and you reach for her. She runs her hands gently over your skin— _skin_ , you have _skin_ —and smiles.

  
"You can turn it off whenever you want," she says. "In case something is too painful or you are about to do something dumb. Or something."

You nod and feel the stretch and fold of your new chassis—no, not chassis, body.

"What do you think?"

Maybe you have spent too much time watching the human romcoms. Maybe she changed something else in your wiring. Maybe another fuse blew.

You edge forwards and press your new mouth to her mouth and let yourself _feel_.

Tingle of warmth, give of her lips against yours, hands in your hair (that’s new), and a swell in your circuitry you’ve never felt before. You can’t speak or process.

So you don’t.

You…feel.

(Later you will ask Jade about the possibility of adding horns to make yourself look more fierce to hunting predators. She gives you nubby little abominations as a joke and you love them, but no need to let her know that.)


End file.
